Thoughts as we leave Mesa Verde National Park ...

We did do a hike yesterday, the Knife Edge Trail, which is actually part of the historic road built into Mesa Verde National Park (in use from 1906 to 1957) ... the road is under-cut by slide areas and was eliminated as a road once the tunnel was built beyond Morefield Campground.  It was a bit ironic that most of the hike appeared to be threatened by slides from above, huge boulders cracked and ready to have gravity play its role ... but, by the time that we got to the end of the trail, the NPS determined that we should stop because of the danger of slides ... guess we were lucky to not have any rocks decide to become unbalanced as we were passing by ...

It was very dry ... even this early in spring with few wildflowers still blooming.  The Ranger mentioned that while much of Colorado got a good snow pack this winter, unfortunately Mesa Verde did not ... and the NPS is concerned about the fire season ahead ...

Paul wanted photo-documentation of his bearded visage ... (it is rumored that he'll shave it off when we again reach the land of full hook-ups ... )

And our hike ended ... with data, of course,

Mesa Verde is not a hiker's national park ... the NPS specifically prohibits backcountry hikes fearing that hikers may happen upon archaeological sites and may interfere with ongoing research or cultural concerns.  The few hikes that are available are focused on directing hikers to scenic overlooks, but some of the beauty is lost in pine bark beetle ravaged forests that have repeatedly been burned over with only limited regrowth. 

We opted in the afternoon to head to Wetherill Mesa for more cliff dwellings, but it was closed until Memorial Day (have I mentioned that we pushed the season a bit?)  So, we went to the Far View sites ... setting for approximately 50 villages with thousands of people at its height ... 

 

Several villages have been excavated ...  and all have a kiva or kivas with tunnels that connected the kivas in winter ... the shape of the kiva had essentially remained unchanged over the hundreds of years that these villages were built and maintained ...

There was a reservoir that helped preserve water resources for the surrounding villages ... In fact, the fires helped uncover many of the dam breaks and channels that were dug to bring water to the crops.  

Interestingly (perhaps only to me), Mesa Verde is not actually a mesa (which would be a flat topped land formation) ... it is more accurately a cuesta (slope) which allows water/snow landing at the higher elevations to flow downward toward the areas of the mesa/cuesta that were used for dry farming ... and the fact that the underlying stone is sandstone, the remaining water percolates through the layers of sandstone and comes out as seeps near the cliff dwellings ... in addition, there is water in the valleys below the cliff dwellings, but it would have been quite difficult to bring much water up to the mesa/cuesta tops to water plants ... this was dry farming.

The average life expectancy for a woman was 24 years ... died of hemorrhage in childbirth with fractured vertebrae in the neck from carrying jugs of water on the head and arthritis in the knees and ankles from kneeling over grinding stones (manos and metates) to prepare corn ...

The average life expectancy for a man was 30 years ... died of infected teeth/gums passing the infection to the heart ...

Alas, a woman's work is never done ...

And, as we prepare to leave Mesa Verde, I pondered the difficulty encountered by these ancestral Puebloan peoples ... they were, in the final 100 years of their occupation of this area, concerned enough about each other that they came off of the mesa tops and built elaborate cliff dwelling villages to protect themselves from those who would threaten from above ... they suffered 23 years of drought ... scarce resources with growing population led to conflict ... and, within two generations, they completely abandoned an area by 1300 AD that they had occupied, farmed, built upon since at least 550 AD.

It leads me to wonder where do we think that we're going to be able to go when global warming and increased global population leads us to scarce resources with growing population and the inevitable conflict ... this failure of ours, as a world community, to adequately address the impact of global warming, not just on the West, but on the world leaves me with grave concerns about the future of our humanity.